Sorry, I've been busy (traveling for work) and wasn't able to keep up with this thread yesterday.
Guitar Steve and Jack,
You guys do understand that having something copyrighted simply means that someone else has to ask you to use it, right?
It does not mean you cannot use copyrighted material or sample copyrighted material in your own work.
It just means you have to ask the original artist for permission.
That's all.
That is an aggressively simplistic view, and incredibly inaccurate in 2016. In 2016, copyright means:
- That manufacturers of electronic devices can add or remove features at will, stop you from running Free Software (e.g. Linux) or your own software on the device, etc. (See "tivoization.")
- That when those electronic devices are embedded into a mechanical device -- like a farm tractor -- DRM and the DMCA is leveraged to circumvent your actual ownership rights to repair or modify the physical machinery you purchased
- That simply by embedding some copyrighted thing into otherwise-uncopyrightable products or services, manufacturers and service providers can censor criticism of their business
- That the copyright cartel is insisting on ever more invasive restrictions on the control you have over your own devices (e.g. they want to ban AdBlock, to eliminate all analog and/or non-DRM'd audio or video interfaces, to be given administrator access to your PC while you are prohibited from having it, etc.) making you defenseless against malware and hacking (sometimes perpetrated by them!).
All of these things are totally and completely unacceptable in a free society (as opposed to one where the concept of private ownership of property has been abolished). This expansion of copyright and associated laws is nothing less than a shift to a new Feudalism, where we are tied not to the land but to our information, which is controlled by feudal lords with names like Facebook, Sony and Comcast.
Is writing a book different than setting up a business?
Scenario 1: I spend 8320 hours, and $6000, writing a book. After all development steps, I am able to hand it off to a distributor. The book ultimately starts producing $2k/mo for me.
Scenario 2: I spend 8320 hours, and $6000, setting up a food truck (brand, recipes, system, etc). After all development steps, I hand it off to a franchisee or manager. The truck ultimately produces $2k/mo for me.
Why would Scenario 1 have a time limit on how long I (or family members) can receive the income , but Scenario 2 wouldn't?
Because the truck keeps producing
new value -- it keeps making and selling additional food. You are getting paid (albeit indirectly)
for the act of producing food, not because the truck continues to exist.
Copyright is like parking the truck in a garage somewhere and expecting it to continue to produce income.
For me, the critical period is "kid's lifetime".
If he didn't survive me, or didn't survive me for long, I would be happy if proceeds went to the cause of my (pre-death) choice. If it went to the good of the world, that's great too. If it went into general funds (say, for war) I would be averse to creating stuff that generated income. (In that case, I would work for pay in a service industry.)
But, I do feel responsible to my kid, he has disabilities that will require support after I go such that I feel I need a long-term plan, and I'm aware of him being the only person affected by my process.
You're still thinking of it from the wrong (and IMO, incredibly selfish) perspective.
The real question is, "why should you get preferential treatment over everyone else who has to work for a living?"
For all the people who are
not writers, their disabled kids are not automatically set for life because of the wages or salary they earned decades earlier. No, instead they have to save the money they earn
while they're working and continuing to produce value and then use that to provide for the kid's needs in the future.
Similarly, there is no reason whatsoever why you as a writer shouldn't be required to save the income received during a
reasonable copyright duration instead of forcing society to give you special treatment by granting what is effectively a
perpetuity on labor you only did once!
As far as I understand the copyright argument, should all passive income streams have a time limit?
I share that question.
I'd prefer an entirely different economic system (that's a matter for another thread), but if this is the one we have, either all investments need to have unlimited income periods or none of them. It doesn't make sense for a food truck, ad agency, stock, or acre of land to have no income limits but choreography, visual art print, or arrangement of words to have set ones.
Looks like I should have read further before I posted. Seems people are drawing a distinction between art, as an idea, and the notion of ownership and money, also ideas.
I'm not seeing the distinction between one social construct and the other. I believe the earlier comment on not understanding when the paycheck is on the line applies.
With a business, you (or your agents) are continuing to directly create value. With copyright, you've only created value yourself once and are instead effectively
taxing others for creating their own value around it.
Also, all passive income streams do have limits: income taxes during their duration, and sales or estate taxes when transferring ownership (from one mortal and therefore inherently finite human to another). You could argue that the estate tax is too low, and I would probably agree with you. I'm not sure whether making it 100% would be a good thing or not.
If you accept the disingenuous and misleading term "intellectual property," you've already ceded a large part of the argument. Allowing copyright to be called that is one of the ways it becomes so easy for the copyright cartel to confuse people into comparing it with actual property, as MrDelane has done.
Copyright is not and never has been anything even slightly like a property right. That is the very first thing that must be crystal-clear to everyone in order to have an intelligent discussion about it.
Jack - do you have any other sources to read more arguments about this?
I'm really interested in this distinction that you keep pointing out between actual property and that "disingenuous and misleading term," intellectual property.
https://www.eff.org/issues/intellectual-property/the-termhttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20080306/003240458/if-intellectual-property-is-neither-intellectual-property-what-is-it.shtmlFundamentally, the difference between property and non-property can be illustrated with a pretty simple example:
Imagine I'm a caveman and that I've found a sharp rock. This rock is pretty useful: I can kill my prey by whacking it in the head with it, I can cut down trees to build shelters with it, I can skin animals to make clothing with it, etc. All the other cavemen are envious and would like to be able to use the rock too, but they can't because there's only one and I'm holding it -- it's physically impossible for everyone to use it at once. Therefore, for someone else to use it they'd have to take it from me, harming me. Since I have a natural right to self-defense, I also have a natural right to prevent someone from taking my rock. That's what makes it
my property.Now imagine I'm a caveman and I've created a sharp rock by figuring out how to chip pieces off it. The particular sharp rock I created is still mine, but now I can show the other cavemen the technique (or maybe they can figure it out on their own) so that they can create sharp rocks for themselves. So then they can use sharp rocks, but I still have mine too -- I've lost nothing. I've not been harmed. What natural right would I have to keep my technique for creating sharp rocks secret? None! That's what makes the idea
not property.I'd like to add that Jack's repeated statement that intellectual property is not the same as physical property, while true, isn't the complete story.
The legal framework in the US is primarily Utilitarian, but the law also draws from a philosophical tradition called the labor theory of ownership, in which ownership of ideas is considered a natural right (and therefore as real as property rights). The basic idea is that through their labor creators make a thing theirs (like gathering berries in the woods makes them yours) so long as they do not unduly stop others from accessing the same resource (by taking all the berries/protecting to basic or broad an idea).
Indeed, that's the theory under which we got the original
reasonable term of copyright. Now the copyright cartels have turned that theory on its head, such that we're now conferring continued "ownership" of the idea even though the creator has long since
stopped laboring, and indeed even gifting him with ownership of
other people's labor (see again the Bitter Sweet Symphony lawsuit mentioned earlier).
A return to the labor theory of ownership would be a marked improvement over the Bizzarro-world version of it expressed in current copyright law.
I explained that the burden of proof is on those who want to take ownership away, not those who want to keep it. If you have ownership on something and I want to take it away from you, it seems I should have to prove my case.
No, the key word there is "If." The burden of proof is upon those who
assert ownership in the first place. You can't take away something that doesn't exist.
Then again, perhaps I've simply drank the kool aid for too long. I can't help but feel that most of those on the 'less copyright' side of the argument don't rely on creating original content for their livelihood.
I'm pretty sure everyone in this thread is perfectly clear on why many copyright holders support infinite increases in the scope and duration of copyright -- forcing the public to pay you for doing no additional work is a pretty damn sweet gig!
The question you need to ask yourself is this:
why should you be entitled to have your privileged livelihood enforced by State violence?
